Rugby wasn't the winner | Hawkes Bay Sport | Surfing, Rugby, Soccer, Football, Cricket in Hawkes Bay

"It's a big fat mess."

That's the verdict of Central Hawke's Bay first XV rugby coach Duncan Quinlivan after the secondary schools' competition left players, mothers, coaches and teachers seething this week.

Quinlivan tells SportToday that Hawke's Bay Rugby Football Union (HBRFU) and competitions manager Ian MacRae must be held accountable as well for the shambolic ending to the season.

"No one is the winner here.

"We have to navel gaze and look hard at what's the fairest thing to do here," he says from Waipukurau, claiming his players are also suffering after "getting into the final by dodgy means".

"It's by no means ideal but CHB are caught between a rock and a hard place.

"We're the piggy in the middle and we didn't want Karamu to walk away with the title cheaply," he says.

A group of irate Karamu High School mothers contacted SportToday this week to highlight how their sons were frustrated and disillusioned with the state of the code after their expectations of playing Lindisfarne College in the A grade final last Saturday didn't eventuate.

Instead, the SportToday draws in Wednesday's section of the newspaper stated they were playing the CHB side, who were top qualifiers in the pool play but had lost their semifinal encounter to Lindisfarne College the previous weekend.

Not amused, the Karamu team emailed the CHB College side at 2.30pm on Friday to default their 11.30am match.

However, Karl Jones, a Lindisfarne schoolteacher and person in charge of co-ordinating weekly draws, bar the finals, on Wednesday remained adamant he was satisfied CHB should have played the final.

Jones claims Lindisfarne had assured CHB they were in the final against Karamu because the former were committed to playing in a quadrangular competition in Christchurch this week.

He did not see why Karamu were making an issue with the "other" semifinal match after beating Wairoa in their play-offs.

Neither could he see why Lindisfarne could not play their final either mid-week before travelling to Christchurch or after returning from the quadrangular commitment.

Karamu mothers fear their children now face losing "everything" if the HBRFU hearing penalises them for protesting and not fronting up last Saturday morning to play CHB.

Had Karamu played, they would have also risked losing their grip on the Terry Hooper Shield, which co-educational schools put on the line as a challenge when playing each other.

Lindisfarne is a boys' school while CHB and Karamu are co-ed ones.

Quinlivan says Lindisfarne should return from their tourney and play Karamu to decide the champions.

After the dust settles from all the commotion, he says the bottom line is children will be deprived of playing rugby.

"Karamu left it to the last minute to notify us for the maximum effect and left 40 boys without a game.

"I didn't want to be there because Lindisfarne should have been there.

"[Karamu coach] Tom Blake is the big catalyst for what they did against us on Saturday.

"He's put a stake in the ground and we're in for a hiding to nothing."

He supports Blake "wholeheartedly" but rues having to postpone his CHB side's match against Wanganui Collegiate with no build-up match now that the final was an anticlimax.

It rankles with Quinlivan that Lindisfarne rates a quadrangular tourney higher at the expense of the Bay competition.

Ben Spriggens is the Lindisfarne first XV coach and Grant Gilbert, of Lindisfarne, is the high schools' delegate to HBRFU.

"They played a certain number of games to keep their nose in the competition," he says of the school, which finished fourth on the table in pool play with CHB at No1, ahead of Wairoa and Karamu.

However Karamu beat Wairoa in the semifinals and Lindisfarne beat CHB, prompting Quinlivan to say Lindisfarne is capable of beating them all.

"We should have as robust a competition as possible but Super 8 is just killing it for everyone," he says, lamenting the loss of the top echelon of teams with the advent of first XV and second XV sides from the Napier Boys' High and Hastings Boys High schools each winter.

St John's College team's departure cripples it further.

"That's why kids come back from the July holidays to find revised draws and no teams to play."

The Colts section, he feels, should have the NBHS and HBHS second teams playing against CHB, KHS, Wairoa and Havelock North High.